Neverwinter: PC

How is the story writing and voice acting(if any)? I'm trying to finish the main story-lines in Star Trek Online which is also done by Arc/Cryptic and the writing/voice acting is pretty bad. Curious if its a Star Trek thing or if Cryptic just isn't very good at storytelling.

I read ahead and pay little attention to the voices as always but it seems done well enough. Lots of familiar voices doing your standard middle earth accents. The setting is all tied into the big 500 year or whatever jump in the Forgotten Realms timeline that came out with a flood of Salvatore etc books. Per usual it takes itself too seriously and doesn't inject enough humor to liven it up the way Bioware smartly does (and WoW over-does, but I much prefer erring in that direction - see my criticisms about Rift's writing from way the fuck back in beta) And as usual, it'd have been more interesting and fun (and expensive) if you had a dialog tree since, you know, this is D&D and alignment is sort of a thing. Apparently only Bioware is capable of the Red Green Blue.

The questing is good in that you have story arcs that take place over several bear ass quests instead of trying to make every single bear ass its own contained absurd story to make it seem urgent and important. (Random Peasant: "These bear asses will SAVE THE UNIVERSE, you MUST GET THEM!") So, closer to SWTOR/recent WoW than the earlier days of MMOs where you get a bunch of quests and don't remember why you are doing any of them. And less quest density overall by a factor of like ten, with lots of mini-dungeons. You can of course skip all dialog and follow the glowing path and miss nothing.

They are interesting enough that I don't care that the mobs are grey, put it that way. And they don't throw a wall of dry text at you like Rift. (although it helps to be vaguely familiar with the setting - I actually made it to Gauntlygrym or so before realizing I was plain bored with Drizzt and friends)

Also, combat is basically Diablo with less mob density and if you need to you can pretty much make yourself immune to damage for as long as it takes for someone else to pull aggro or finish off whatever is chasing you.

As a ranger, doorway chokepoints are delicious and a tank companion is a must.

Kreugen_sl said:

I read ahead and pay little attention to the voices as always but it seems done well enough. Lots of familiar voices doing your standard middle earth accents. The setting is all tied into the big 500 year or whatever jump in the Forgotten Realms timeline that came out with a flood of Salvatore etc books. Per usual it takes itself too seriously and doesn't inject enough humor to liven it up the way Bioware smartly does (and WoW over-does, but I much prefer erring in that direction - see my criticisms about Rift's writing from way the fuck back in beta) And as usual, it'd have been more interesting and fun (and expensive) if you had a dialog tree since, you know, this is D&D and alignment is sort of a thing. Apparently only Bioware is capable of the Red Green Blue.

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It would be nice if some MMO would actually design a quality dialog tree that gave you more than two options to choose. In SWTOR your dialog choices gave you Light/Dark points but they had to little to no impact on the rest of the quest. The NPC's response was worded to reflect your Light or Dark side response but then you still ended up with only one path to follow for the next stage of the quest.

An ideal D&D-based MMO should have an alignment system that awarded either Lawful or Chaotic points depending on your choices as well as Good or Evil points. That would require more than two obvious dialog/quest options to choose from.

Of course in the real world doing a quality dialog tree or alignment system would probably cost a lot of time and money so unlikely we would ever see anything that resembles an old school Ultima or Bioware RPG.

A lot cheaper to pull off without all the voice acting. It turned SWTOR into a behemoth. Hell, SWTOR even voiced your own character, with multiple accents.

Of course you can just have less quests/dialog and have them take longer to complete. Which is how NW seems set up, so far.

Downside is, unlike a subscription game, you can't just pay a $15 sub for a few months to "rent" hundreds of dollars worth of premium perks.

I'd love to see choices be given more weight but I'm completely fine with the Bioware/telltale trick of thinking my choices matter when they actually have little/no effect on the overall story as long as its well done.

Plus it's funny as hell when even Sith are going "dude.. what the fuck?" after you blow up a shuttle of women and children for no reason.

Got my control wizard to 30. Fuck yeah. Taking a breather to let my healbot get his last 2 levels done. Looking forward to the new dps god awesomeness of fire/thaumaturge.

Sylas_sl said:

Fire is the control path, spellstorm renegade is the dps beast.

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True but control is just too good, dat force choke works on bosses too, huge damage reduction to the tank, that and a single control wizard can keep all the adds busy while the rest of the group burns down the boss.

Unknown number of layoffs at perfect world:

Perfect World Entertainment hit with potentially massive layoffs | Massively Overpowered

ZyyzYzzy_sl said:

Anyone know of a decent site for soecs and what not? Feel like I'm just throwing points into skills randomly on my ranger.

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On the official forums there are a few threads with guides, some are very detailed.

At what rank should I start refining gems vs feeding them to my lantern for inventory space?

Honestly if the rewards for the foundry quests weren't such ass I'd do nothing but those all day. Holy hell are some of them really fun and/or hilarious. If you haven't, find "Tired of being the hero" and do that one. It's cheesy as hell but I giggled at the end.

Kreugen_sl said:

At what rank should I start refining gems vs feeding them to my lantern for inventory space?

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As you level, you keep finding higher level gems just as drops for free, up until rank 4. You can create a rank 5 yourself through refining, or just buy a set of rank 5's of the gems you want on the auction house fairly cheaply.

Going past rank 5 to 6 and beyond starts to get very expensive due to the reagents to upgrade past that point. That's not something you want to bother with until max level and you're gear is mostly complete.

Cool thanks. Storage is a $$$premium$$$

Zehn - Vhex_sl said:

Honestly if the rewards for the foundry quests weren't such ass I'd do nothing but those all day. Holy hell are some of them really fun and/or hilarious. If you haven't, find "Tired of being the hero" and do that one. It's cheesy as hell but I giggled at the end.

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It's been over a year since I played but I'm
99% certain Cryptic keeps an "average time to complete" metric for every Foundry quest because the only ones eligible for the Daily quest have to exceed a specific minimum time to complete (think it's 15 minutes). The most popular speedrun foundry dungeons frequently have to be updated to add some extra rooms and mobs to get them back over the minimum time requirement.

Using that time metric, Cryptic could improve the completion reward by basing it on that metric. For example, less than 30 minutes you just get daily quest credit;
30-45 minutes you get daily credit plus some astral diamonds, 45-60 all the previous reward plus chance at a blue item, 60+ minutes all the previous awards with a chance for some significant loot reward.

It's been a while and I can't remember the name of it but there was one Foundry dungeon that stated up front it required a full group, mob difficulty was very high, and it took 1-2 hours to complete. I wanted to run it but guildmates who had already ran it had no interest in repeating it. I remember them saying it was one of the best Foundry dungeons available in terms of design, story, etc but there just wasn't any point to run it more than once due to the crappy reward.

Seems to me enhancing the reward incentive for the Foundry dungeons would be something Cryptic should be willing to do to increase the number of people playing their game. If the creator of a Foundry dungeon did a really good job, the game allows you to send them astral diamonds as a tip. So not only do you create an incentive for players to create quality content, you provide an incentive for players to run it. Seems like a win-win scenario to me.

I believe that was the original idea behind the foundry. But like anything it gets abused if its repeatable and exploitable. If its solely based on time, people could sit in the zone entrance for 55 minutes then do 6 minutes of content, same loot as the real quest you described. If you're thinking "who will sit there for 55 minutes" the answer is simple autohot key scripts.

Getting enough people to do that on a regular basis to significantly alter the average run time would be pretty difficult though. Especially if you have your averaging system ignore the 30% longest completion times or something to account for people that had to frequently afk or what have you during it.

Only have loot drop from dungeons that are time tested and mother approved. To prevent abuse have some intern test any dungeon that has like 10,000+ completions and 200+ favorable reviews or whatever. To encourage new dungeons to develop you give them non-end game loot that can't be used in PvP, buffs and bonus xp. If someone wants to create a simple straight hallway foundry quest to exploit, then so be it, who really cares given how easy it is to max level in the game anyways?

But all your new players or people sick of the same level grind with each character who just wants to hit up random foundry quests? It'd be perfect.